For any brand it is vital to understand everything about your customers – the ones you have and the ones you want to have. Once you understand who they are, you can engage with them, which is necessary to keep your brand at the forefront of their minds. Running a web based promotion is one way to interact with customers and find out more about them. By offering prizes in exchange for invaluable customer data, you not only increase sales but collect details that can help inform future marketing and sales strategies.

On winning a prize, your customers will most likely use social media to tell friends and family about it, thus increasing publicity and ultimately sales.

Web based promotions are tailored to your target audience and budget. You can give away a tour of your factory, an iPad or offer big headline prizes such as glamourous trips abroad or sports cars. The world is your oyster!

How to go about it?

When deciding on the type of web promotion to run, consider: what are your primary objectives? Do you want more Facebook ‘likes’, more sales, increased brand awareness, or something else?

Facebook ‘likes’ are very easy to achieve as a promotion is simply set up to block customers playing unless they ‘like’ the Facebook page. Will an increase in ‘likes’ alone satisfy the requirements of the promotion?

If you wish to increase sales, your promotion might offer extremely generous gifts with an ‘everyone wins’ tag. Although you’ll need a budget for the prizes, it is sure to get people interested and to make your product stand out from the non-promotional product next to it on the shelf.

To increase brand awareness, you will need to set realistic goals. You also need to have a mechanism to measure the awareness the promotion has had on your target audience.

The prize pool is key to any promotion, whether it be 20 holidays or a single iPad. Your budget will determine the prize pool and the prize pool will determine how ‘big’ you can make your promotion and what mechanism should be used. For example a promotion offering one iPad may be suited to a prize draw, whereas tiered prizes from holidays to mugs work well in a scratch card promotion.

There are some basic steps to ensure the promotion runs smoothly. Firstly you must set a start date for the promotion and work backwards to make sure promotional products are in stock from that date with all the relevant literature. This may be bottle necks with information (including unique codes), peel-back stickers, leaflets in packaging and so on. Once the promotion is underway, you’ll also need to advertise it both online and offline. There are various options to choose from here including trade magazines, web banners and social media.

There is always work to do once a promotion is finished, from revealing the winner and distributing prizes to reviewing the valuable data from players. This is important for planning future promotions, developing marketing strategies and forming a relationship with those people who opted in to receive further communications.

How can we help?

Vanilla Active can help you create a promotion from start to finish. We will design, build and support it and offer detailed analysis on the type of people that buy your products. We can also introduce you to various partners who can help with support lines, writing of terms and conditions, sourcing prizes and delivery.

Vanilla Active have many years of experience developing promotions of all shapes and sizes. We offer innovative digital marketing tools that seamlessly integrate with your brand strategy via all channels – at home, on the move, in store, online, offline, on a mobile, on a tablet.